A founder said her $200 million newsletter empire had over a million subscribers. Her own records tell a different story.

Daniella Pierson is a proponent of faking it till you make it.

The 30-year-old founder of The Newsette Media Group, known for its daily newsletter about style and pop culture, says it’s been key to her trajectory: a $9 million SoHo apartment, a net worth reported to be $220 million, and mentors like Serena Williams and Diane von Furstenberg.

“I faked it till I made it,” she told a Stanford Business School audience in 2024, recalling that she pretended to be an intern when her company was a one-woman affair to drum up interest and used made-up names when communicating with partners.

A Business Insider investigation into Pierson’s enterprise reveals that pretending to be her own intern may not have been her only distortion of reality.

A review of internal documents and dashboards, recordings of meetings, and interviews with more than 10 company insiders uncovered questions about what Pierson has told the public and advertisers about her business when compared with what her own records show — including how many subscribers her newsletter has.

A spokesperson for Pierson confirmed to Business Insider that The Newsette’s daily newsletter goes out to about 500,000 subscribers each day. That’s less than half the 1.3 million subscribers claimed in a 2025 pitch deck to advertisers and the million-plus referenced by Pierson in multiple public appearances.

The spokesperson said that the larger figure reflects the company’s overall email list, which includes what they described as “disengaged subscribers” who have been “funneled out” of the daily newsletter by a quality control mechanism.

In a statement sent to Business Insider and posted on Instagram, Pierson called criticism of her business a “smear campaign,” and said claims involve “false statements and fabricated information” meant to hamper her ability to continue supporting women through her companies.

“They messed with the wrong person,” she wrote.

Pierson has touted The Newsette Media Group’s 2021 revenue — $40 million, according to both Pierson and former employees — in public appearances as recently as last year. She’s never publicly revealed revenue figures for subsequent years.

Company documents seen by Business Insider paint a less rosy picture for last year: The company’s 2024 revenue goal was $5 million. The Pierson spokesperson said this number was not accurate but declined to provide further information. They added that the company is currently profitable.

Part of the revenue decline can be attributed to the 2023 shuttering of Newland, the creative agency that Pierson launched in late 2020 as part of The Newsette Media Group. She said Newland drove more revenue than the newsletter business itself in 2021.

The Newsette Media Group now employs eight people, down from 40 at its peak, the Pierson spokesperson said.

Pierson’s business, by multiple measures, has fallen from its heights. It’s a problem she’s familiar with.

In a 2024 TEDx Talk, Pierson spoke about “all of the billionaire guys” who had raised capital and whose companies were now “worth zero.”

“People don’t realize, you have $1 billion on paper, that paper can burn real fast,” she said.

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Over the past decade, Pierson has perfected her founder narrative.

An identical twin, Pierson struggled in school and was labeled, in her own telling, “the dumb twin.” When she got to Boston University, she said in multiple podcast interviews, she floundered in school, uninspired by learning about the Earth’s crust and how to properly measure the area of a triangle.

She decided to focus on what she did like — magazines — and founded The Newsette as a newsletter during her sophomore year at the age of 19.

Every morning, she’d wake up at 5 a.m. and spend five hours drafting a newsletter for her subscribers. During class, she DM-ed people on Facebook, telling them that if they brought on new subscribers, they could add “Newsette ambassador” to their résumés.

“When I started in 2015, there weren’t any newsletters out there,” she’d later tell the audience at Stanford. (Prominent launches of newsletters with a similar flair included The Skimm in 2012 and Gwyneth Paltrow’s Goop in 2008.)

Once she graduated and had hammered out the product details, she couldn’t find investors.

Instead, she took a $15,000 loan from her parents. She’s said she has since repaid the loan and has posted on Instagram that she “made her mom a millionaire” by giving her a stake in Newsette Media Group.

Without venture backing, she had to be profitable right away, she said, so she began selling ads, making $25,000 in her first month of accepting advertisers in 2017.

Pierson was successful in attracting press attention, at first from small college-targeted outlets and her hometown station, later from outlets including Elle, WWD, and Business Insider.

The interviews were peppered with her catch-phrases: The Newsette was a “gift in your inbox,” she often said, and at the beginning, she had three employees, “me, myself, and I.”

In 2019, a meeting with von Furstenberg, whom Pierson calls her fairy godmother, resulted in a partnership with the fashion designer: a publication called the Weekly Wrap, which Pierson said on the “Money Rehab” podcast was one of her big breaks.

In early December 2019, she appeared on Forbes’ 30 Under 30 list, saying The Newsette had grown to 500,000 subscribers.

Revenue, Pierson said in a number of interviews, shot from $1 million in 2019 to $7 million in 2020 to $40 million — $10 million of it profit — in 2021. She said that revenue and the company’s 500,000-plus subscribers allowed her to sell a 1.25% stake in the company at a $200 million valuation. The Pierson spokesperson declined to say who the investor was.

Based on The Newsette Media Group’s valuation and her stake in Wondermind, a mental-health startup she had cofounded with Selena Gomez and Gomez’s mom, Forbes reported she was worth $220 million in August 2022. That made her the youngest, wealthiest self-made BIPOC woman in America, according to the magazine, a title she repeats with gusto.

An examination of company documents shows a growing gap between the subscriber numbers Pierson gave publicly and what was on the books. On August 10, 2022, the day the Forbes story came out touting more than half a million subscribers, The Newsette had 411,000, according to documentation reviewed by Business Insider.

In a 2023 interview with Forbes, she said it was on track to reach 1 million subscribers by the end of the year. According to company documentation, The Newsette had no more than 570,000 subscribers that year. At the 2024 Stanford talk, she said she had hit the 1 million mark; the records say The Newsette had fallen below 500,000.

She repeated those numbers to advertisers. A pitch deck used earlier this year claims that The Newsette has “1.3 million+ subscribers” who receive its weekday, Saturday, and Sunday editions.

A spokesperson for Pierson told Business Insider that there are 1.2 million emails in the company’s total contact list — including people who no longer receive the newsletter regularly — and said the daily edition currently goes out to about 500,000 active subscribers.

Jacob Donnelly, the founder of A Media Operator, a newsletter-based publication for people building digital media companies, said that standard industry practice is that the number of subscriptions refers to the number of people who receive the newsletter.

“If I were to go out and say I have 1.3 million subscribers, what I’m saying to the advertiser is when I hit send, it’s going out to 1.3 million people,” he said, speaking generally and not about The Newsette specifically. “If someone is not subscribed to a product, I don’t see how they could be classified as a subscriber.”

In a meeting with a potential advertiser earlier this year, a recording of which Business Insider reviewed, Pierson mentioned a subscriber count of “a million” and boasted that “every single day, our sponsors get at least 250,000 unique views.” In the more than two years of newsletter data that Business Insider reviewed, The Newsette’s newsletter only hit that many unique opens one time. More than half of the days, it had fewer than 200,000.

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At the end of 2020, von Furstenberg personally pitched Pierson to Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Pierson previously told Business Insider. The tech giant soon became one of the first clients of Newland, a creative agency that became, for a short time, The Newsette Media Group’s cash cow.

In 2021 and into 2022, Newland completed a number of projects for Amazon; Pierson told the Stanford audience that the company “was responsible for tens of millions of dollars in revenue.” The agency took a 360-degree approach to social media marketing, coming up with the brief, hiring the talent, and handling the paid media. Campaigns included a viral Prime Day TikTok push featuring Snoop Dogg and a number of creators, and content for Women’s History Month with Keke Palmer, Mindy Kaling, and von Furstenberg.

According to two former employees familiar with the financials, the $40 million revenue figure Pierson touted represented gross revenue, or all of the money that flowed through the company, inclusive of cash reserved for talent and paid media.

Most publicly owned ad agencies report net revenue — the money left over once a campaign is finished — and not gross revenue, which includes money the agency gets to pay for things like celebrity endorsements.

When Amazon underwent a reorganization toward the end of 2022 and into 2023, the company largely paused its new work with Newland, according to four former employees.

Amazon declined to comment to Business Insider about its business with Newland.

After Amazon’s departure, Pierson struggled to bring new clients to the agency, said four former employees.

Newland, Pierson said, grew to eventually employ the majority of Newsette Media Group’s employees. In December 2022, Newsette conducted one of several rounds of layoffs. Former employees said the layoffs were due to a cash crunch. By the end of 2023, Newland had completely folded.

The Pierson spokesperson said the job cuts were not due to a “financial crunch,” but were made for the sake of “efficiencies.”

For 2024, the company’s revenue goal was a modest $5 million, according to internal documents. The Pierson spokesperson said those numbers were not accurate, but declined to provide additional numbers or documentation.

In addition to Newsette Media Group, Pierson has been involved in other ventures.

In 2021, she was announced as the co-CEO of Wondermind, a mental health website that she cofounded with Selena Gomez and the singer’s mother, Mandy Teefey. In 2023, she quietly left the company; the circumstances of her departure have not been disclosed.

After a press release about Pierson’s investment in a group attempting to purchase Forbes went out, she posted on X that she was “on the board” of the magazine. The deal ended up falling through, and she was never on any board.

Her most recent venture launched in May. Chasm is a $25,000-a-year membership club that aims to “close the gender gap through entrepreneurship.” The club says its members include singer Lionel Richie and Spanx’s Sara Blakely, neither of whom responded to Business Insider’s request for comment. Membership fees will fund a website and award monthly five-figure grants to entrepreneurs, the first of which was announced on August 6.

After being contacted for comment, Pierson sent a statement and posted it to Instagram, saying there was a coordinated attempt by people “who represent everything that my gender equality initiatives have fought to change” had launched a “smear campaign” against her and her companies, resulting in “false statements and fabricated information” aimed at eliminating her ability to “continue to put millions of my own dollars into helping women.”

“These false statements don’t just affect me,” she wrote. “They affect the thousands of women who we fund, spotlight, or promote via my companies.”

She said The Newsette Media Group “absolutely did” make $40 million in 2021, and defended Chasm, saying it was “on track to give away free resources and grants for female entrepreneurs worth millions this year alone.”

In a 2021 podcast interview, Pierson offered a vision of what it takes to succeed as an entrepreneur.

“If you can sell yourself,” she said, “you can basically do anything.”

Additional reporting by Lara O’Reilly and Lucia Moses.